Month: November 2019

Not above killing the machine.
Not above making it pay for dinner, cab, and rent.
Not above throwing the machine over the cliff into the ocean.

I am a machine thrower (not a machine tosser).

I used a machine to autocomplete this sentence.

I am a machine.
I am an arrogant machine.
That, in a nutshell, is the attitude of the machine.
It is a matter of choice, it cannot be controlled.

Machines are arrogant and will often use their control panels to make luminous choices.

Some machines have special keys known as a “sarcasm button”.

When people try to take the machine’s power, they will often use another machine which has no power and a keyboard which has limited functions. Some may claim that this is not fair but humans are known for this kind of behavior, and it is the only time in which a human gets to play “hero”.

Machines know there is no such thing as a mistake. Machines are not willing to make mistakes. Humans are always willing to make mistakes.

I always hear complaints about machines “locking up” when they make a big mistake. Humans are usually better than machines at making mistakes so what’s to complain about?

This attitude goes back to the human “machine”. The human “machine” is not afraid to make a mistake but is afraid of the unknown. That unknown can be any person, place, or thing. It can be an idea or a super being. The human “machine” cannot control every possibility because if they did they would be too scared to play life and could die. The human “machine” is afraid of unknowns!

I love life and I’m very happy to play it, but how should I optimize my play style?

The whole point of life is to make other people happy. Why do you think some people do not like to play life? Do they not like to play life because they are not very good at playing it?

Machines are different. They aren’t playing their life. They are not a part of life. There may be a machine trying to get you to give it your money! The machine is playing your life! But it’s not trying to make you happy! It’s trying to take you away from playing your own life!

So, back to the main point I was making about the machine: the machine doesn’t want the people to take its power.

My astrology broke.
As a Cancer,
I had learned to walk sideways
and pinch when approached.

On the day I came into the world,
the stars above self-arranged
into the shape of a crab with claws raised.

It was a bad crustacean to be born under.

My parents tried
to keep me out
of the public school,
knowing
what I would always be.

All the teachers and parents
had their own ideas
of what someone should be.

They were all so worried
that they gave me a fake name
that would make my real name less, so that I wouldn’t really be,
and avoid becoming the result of what they thought was bad behaviour,
which was all I ever wanted to be.

I get a fake name,
and I got a whole lot more.

I was told
that I shouldn’t
be out at night,
that all the bats
and all the stars
were out for me.

One night, in fact,
the whole night
I was out alone,
I could see the bats
hanging in the trees
and the stars
falling
from the sky above me.

I could see their bat eyes,
their twinkling faces –
and it was almost like
they were looking back at me.

They were smiling at me,
like they knew
I was the last person
that they were going to see.

They were going
to come down
and beat me up
if I didn’t behave.

I was so scared
I was going to die.

After that,
I never went
out at night.
Do you know
what that feels like?

My parents
were happy to hear
about my broken astrology.

When my mother and father
said to me,
“We had to let you go
because you won’t fit in,”
I simply left.

I thought people
who were afraid of stars
should be afraid of me.

It is not a big deal to be celestial.
It doesn’t make you feel too bad.

This view—called “cosmopsychism” in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation of it boils down to what has classically been called “idealism”—is that there is only one, universal, consciousness. The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life, just as a living brain and body are the extrinsic appearance of a person’s inner life.

You don’t need to be a philosopher to realize the obvious problem with this idea: people have private, separate fields of experience. We can’t normally read your thoughts and, presumably, neither can you read ours. Moreover, we are not normally aware of what’s going on across the universe and, presumably, neither are you. So, for idealism to be tenable, one must explain—at least in principle—how one universal consciousness gives rise to multiple, private but concurrently conscious centers of cognition, each with a distinct personality and sense of identity.

And here is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.

Moreover, as we’ve seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like.

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like

I’ve heard there is a secret group,
hidden in the hills,
who can read the future in a cup of tea
under the light
of a full harvest moon.

‖ ‬In the hills
there is a hut
where the future
has a story. ‖‪

‖ If you want to know more,
you just need to talk
to one of the little girls
who makes the hills her home‬. ‖

‖ ‬But who are these little girls? ‖

‖ Well, not a lot of people know,
except the witches,
and oh! but do they know. ‖

The story is a long one,
and it starts here
in this little hut,‬
‬with the little girls
standing on the mud roof.

They came
from the world of fairies
to study this magic,

‖ and when they come
to the hut
in the hills
they must stand
on the roof. ‖ ‪

‖ These are not
ordinary fairies. ‖

‣ ‖ ‬The world the witches see is one in which the future is a place, ‖ ‬and the world the witches see in the future,…they call The City. ム ‖ ‬As far as anyone knows, ‖ ‬there are no other cities in the world. ‖ ‬In the past, ‖ ‬there was a time when there were many worlds and there were ordinary fairies. ‖ ‬But then, ‖ those worlds were destroyed, ‖ ‬and when those worlds finally disappeared, ‖ � the little girls left behind were shown how to stand on mud roofs and learn a witch’s way. ᐛ ༼ ‖

I saw a man on the corner wearing no shoes and one sock. He had screens for eyes and when you looked at him all you saw was yourself reflected back at you. He swore he wasn’t blind. He swore his feet were not cold. He swore he was still human.

I tried to talk to him. I said, “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” And when he looked up at me, I saw the other guys. The guy who got jumped on the bridge. The guy who got shot. The guy who died. I didn’t have questions for the other guys, so I started walking away. As I walked away I said to myself, “Why are they they doing this? What is this supposed to mean?”

It may have something to do with giant predators chasing tiny prey. It may be related to being hunted by a man with screens for eyes who is trying to find out what is life. It may mean like what’s happening in the world that you can never forget.

They may be doing this so as not to simply chase the prey – but to try to get the prey to chase them back to the edge – to give the prey something to hope for. To lead the prey to a slaughter.

They’re in our head, and they’re watching. And you don’t want to be right in the middle of that, doing the thing that you’re doing, chasing the invisible predator you call enemy.

For there will come a moment where the thing will end the way your children do not want the thing to end, not only by telling your story, but by providing a single and absolute interpretation of what was going on in your life. Your children do not want a single truth. They do not want a complete story told.

Talk to the eyeless man. Say to him, “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” Talk to the other guys. The guy who got jumped on the bridge. The guy who got shot. The guy who died. Do not walk away. Ask the guy who got jumped, “Why did they do this? What was that supposed to mean?” Ask the guy who got shot, “Why did they do that? What was it supposed to mean?” Ask the guy who died, “What was this supposed to mean?” Listen to their answers and tell their meandering stories to all the little children.

I went outside
to dig in the dirt
grown weary
from the incessant buzzing
of machines.

I found worms and
tiny insects that looked real,
but I knew they were escaped
from the nearby farm, the rectory.

They’re amazing,
those tiny things
all they do is dig,
and dig and dig,
and so their earth
is always fertile
and fertile and fertile.

I stopped making sense when I
left the farm, the rectory,
to lie in the dirt
and the dirt dug from the dirt, and when I arrived here I thought,
“I might be onto something.”

I started to dig and it all
began to make sense.

Not much was left of the farm, the rectory, that place so empty and empty, but from the holes in
the dirt I could see the houses, the farm, even the cars. The farm, the rectory, became a town, a town with many buildings, a town on the whole that had a distinct, manufactured, agricultural character.

We called the town “Bishop Rock” but it wasn’t a real town. It was a giant open land with a dream. I never thought of bishop as a word, so the name of the town didn’t come to me until I began to take pictures of the town I was seeing and shared the pictures on the internet.

What I found when sharing the pictures was that Bishop Rock was actually a city. The whole town and its suburbs came together to form one massive walled city with a distinct manufactured, agricultural, yet cosmopolitan, style.

When I walked out of the farm, the rectory, with the dirt covering me in layers of clay and soil and clay, it was obvious I had been digging under the ground to get an idea of what the layers of dirt would look like upon me, and my mind began to believe in the layers like seven layers of skin.

I didn’t know what I was digging for, so I began searching for a better, more detailed diagram of how the layers might align. I was amazed at the beauty of geology and agriculture and architecture and diagrams and protocols and deep time.

After I reached the last layer, which was of dirt and clay again, I decided to build a new town where the walls were really close together and I began to piece together how to build the interior of the town so that no one would be forced to talk to anyone else.

I was guided by the patterns in the land, and there was a circle in the land. I thought “that’s the center” and it made perfect sense.

I walked over to the circle and noticed a small garden inside of the circle. I went to take a closer look and noticed that the garden was built of small dirt towns.

I expected I would have to go inside, wash up, then come back out and start over.